Mark Adair-Rios and Peter Oldring, Love That Girl These actors, on the other hand, either try way too hard, or not hard enough, and embarrass themselves … and us. But actors such as Eric Stonestreet ( Modern Family) manage to inject warmth, heart, and sincerity into the theatrics. Most of these performances rely on cliche and stereotype, and to be fair, a lot of our favorite gay performances from straight actors do lean heavily on the flamboyant. Straight actors who crashed and burned attempting to play gay. So we decided instead to sharpen our knives and make a list that’s a hell of a lot more fun. Our post about gay actors playing straight characters got us thinking about the flipside, straight actors playing gay characters.īut a list of straight actors successfully playing gay would be obvious ( Tom Hanks, Heath Ledger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and frankly dull.